The cultural gender war heats up for Anne Hathaway in sci-fi-horror ‘The Shower’

There's a British horror-comedy from 2009 called “Doghouse,” written by Dan Schaffer and directed by Jake West. In it, a group of guys trying to help a friend deal with his divorce all go to a small village where a virus has turned every single woman into a man-eating monster. Literally.

One of the scripts from last year's Black List, written by Jac Schaeffer, “The Shower” is about a group of women who get together for a baby shower, only to have it interrupted by debris from space. The meteor shower drops one of the meteoroids right into their backyard, and the women get their first taste of what's happening when Jimmy Choo, a toy Pomeranian, goes insane and attacks them.

Sure enough, the meteoroids mutate anything male into a bigger, nastier, scalier version that wants to kill. Or, to be more accurate, it causes them to birth nasty alien creatures from their mouths, and those are terribly deadly. The women, including Mary, who is the pregnant lead, end up on an insane race through the city, slowly piecing together what's happening, and it is a fast, filthy, uber-violent delight on the page. Writer/director Jac Schaeffer made a delightful small movie called “TiMER” that never really got the attention it deserved, a smart riff on the romantic comedy through a science-fiction filter. She's obvious a genre fan, and now it looks like she's going to get a shot at something big and crazy and fun, and Anne Hathaway serving as director and star is going to give Schaeffer the right kind of support to see her vision through without someone else ruining it.

I'm excited about this one, and I think it speaks well to Hathaway's eye for material. It's a good match for her, and it's going to push her to a new place, something that has to be exciting for any actor.

In the meantime, you can see her onscreen in “The Intern” on September 25, 2015.